Note to Professors/Instructors
This graduate engineering course was originally developed and taught by Dr. Joshua M. Pearce, while acting as a visiting professor for Aalto University in Finland as a Fulbright Aalto Distinguished Chair (original course). All content is released cc-by-sa and you are welcome and encouraged to use any or all of the course at your own university. It was meant to act as two coupled courses over two Finnish terms (roughly equivalent to one U.S. semester). It made use of a bank of open source Lulzbot Taz 6 and Lulzbot Mini 3-D printers housed in the Aalto FabLab. For instructors wishing to replicate the course it is recommended to have at least one 3-D printer for every 3 students on reserve for the course as the course is printing intensive.

The general idea is that the first part of the course hones students' skills and then they apply it to a hardware challenge in their own lab. The second part of the course invites the best projects to be polished for a peer-reviewed open hardware article. For an example of the outcome of the course see the following manuscript developed by 3 course students to enable the use of 3-D printed plastic in chemical processing:
Ismo T. S. Heikkinen, Christoffer Kauppinen, Zhengjun Liu, Sanja M. Asikainen, Steven Spoljaric, Jukka V. Seppälä, Hele Savin, and Joshua M. Pearce. Chemical Compatibility of Fused Filament Fabrication -based 3-D Printed Components with Solutions Commonly Used in Semiconductor Wet Processing. Additive Manufacturing 23, pp. 99-107 (2018). DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.addma.2018.07.015open access, Source files- Included SCAD and STL files for the designs tested.

Part 1: Introduction to 3-D printing of open source hardware for science.[edit]

This course provides an introduction to the use of distributed digital manufacturing of open source hardware for scientific and engineering applications. Recent progress in this area has radically reduced the costs of scientific equipment, while enabling high-quality state-of-the-art customized experiments.

First this course will provide an overview of open-source hardware and technological development in theory and practice. Licensing issues will be explained. Both the use of free and open source design and manufacturing software and their user communities will be highlighted and demonstrated. Next, the course will detail the design, use and maintenance of the tools themselves and open-source electronics. In particular, the self-replicating rapid prototypers (RepRap) will be discussed in detail including: hardware, firmware, slicing and printer controller software for operating and maintaining the device. Finally the material properties, applications and ramifications of RepRap technology will be discussed along with the development of and other open hardware fabrication tools. Then, the technological evolution of the open-source digital manufacturing technology will be covered with a focus on developing innovation for improved performance and customization.

This will be a project-based course where students learn how to develop open hardware for their own experiments and assignments will develop students' skills through progressively more sophisticated design challenges. The final and most complicated challenge will be student-selected to assist their own research group and will make use of open source 3-D printers to fabricate the device.

Prerequisites. The course is meant for graduate students in science or engineering. While students in other areas with a strong interest in this topic are also welcomed they are expected to have a fundamental scientific understanding and be technically proficient.

Why open source? You will make more money, because OS is more valuable. Recent analysis shows that jobs with the keywords "Microsoft Windows" have an average salary of $64,000, while jobs with the keyword "Linux" have an average salary of $99,000. [2]

Why open source hardware in science? Numerous studies have now shown that custom scientific hardware creates enormous value, enables more rapid development of science, better equipment and provides jaw-dropping ROIs for science funders.[3]

This course will be run as an intense seminar meeting as a group. Students will be expected to read the course material before class and actively participate in discussions. The majority of class time will be spent on projects in a flipped class format. Each student will be responsible for designing and in the final project building open source scientific hardware. Students will be responsible for giving short presentations on their projects on each sub-topic in front of the class.

Learn the fundamentals of additive manufacturing (AM) and 3-D printing with polymers, along with those for emerging materials (e.g., metals, ceramics, flexible materials, nanocomposites, biomaterials) and complex architectures.

Learn the fundamentals of free and open source hardware (FOSH) design, licensing, and culture.

Understand the principles of "Design for 3-D printing" and compare and contrast additive processes with conventional manufacturing in terms of rate, quality, cost, environmental impact, social control and flexibility.

Gain hands-on experience with RepRap 3-D printers; use these machines to fabricate example parts of increasing complexity, post-process the parts, and study the results.

Become familiar with the complete workflow of open source AM, including computational design tools, firmware, software, file formats, toolpath generation, and characterization.

Understand how to make a new part and alter an existing part for RepRap 3-D printing for custom applications.

Appropriate behavior, attendance, participation and collaboration with your peers on group assignments is expected.
Collaboration/Plagiarism Rules
Collaboration is encouraged on the group project but the individual projects must be completed alone.
Follow all University rules.

Part 2: Advanced 3-D printing of open source hardware for science[edit]

Part 2:Advanced 3-D printing of open source hardware for science (By Invitation Only)
The best student projects from period 1 will be selected to be further refined in period 2 of the course. This will focus on documentation, design optimization, validation, technical specification evaluation, economic analysis and writing for the peer-reviewed literature. The course outcome will be a peer-reviewed publication submitted to a journal such as HardwareX, a new journal from Elsevier, to encourage open design of scientific hardware.

Prerequisites: Part 1 and invitation from instructor.

Grading: Grades will be based on preparation of an open source hardware article for peer review.

Note to instructors: This second part normally only meets once per week and operates more as an independent study. In my group we use a algorithm for paper writing, which is particularly useful for writing many papers at the simultaneously and it is a good way to introduce new students to academic writing.

Importance of publishing, Introduction to algorithm: MOST paper writing], Pearce, J.M. How to Perform a Literature Review with Free and Open Source Software. Practical Assessment, Research & Evaluation, 23(9), 2018. open access

The impact factor (IF) of an academic journal is a measure reflecting the yearly average number of citations to recent articles published in that journal. It is frequently used as a proxy for the relative importance of a journal within its field. In any given year, the impact factor of a journal is the number of citations, received in that year, of articles published in that journal during the two preceding years, divided by the total number of articles published in that journal during the two preceding years. So are articles in that journal getting cited fast after publication. * Because citation counts have highly skewed distributions, the mean number of citations is potentially misleading if used to gauge the typical impact of articles in the journal rather than the overall impact of the journal itself. For example, about 90% of Nature's 2004 impact factor was based on only a quarter of its publications, and thus the actual number of citations for a single article in the journal is in most cases much lower than the mean number of citations across articles.

The strength of the relationship between impact factors of journals and the citation rates of the papers therein has been steadily decreasing since articles began to be available digitally. [4]

The definition of the index is that a scholar with an index of h has published h papers each of which has been cited in other papers at least h times. Thus, the h-index reflects both the number of publications and the number of citations per publication. The index is designed to improve upon simpler measures such as the total number of citations or publications. The index works properly only for comparing scientists working in the same field; citation conventions differ widely among different fields.

You can also somewhat predict your future hindex. The variables you have control over are variables are number of articles, number of distinct journals and number of articles in top journals.

To compare to older colleagues: The m-index is defined as h/n, where n is the number of years since the first published paper of the scientist; also called m-quotient. You can also subtract the difference in your starting years from their Google Scholar profile.

h-index: (goals for faculty at major research universities)

10≤h≤12: might be a typical value for advancement to tenure (associate professor)
h≈18: advancement to full professor
15≤h≤20: fellowship in the American Physical Society might typically occur at this level
h≥45: membership in the US National Academy of Sciences may typically be associated with such a value, except in exceptional circumstances.